Better to Reign in Hell
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
One - Bin Laden Is a Raider Fan
Two - Oakland’s Burning
From Salon Culture to the California Barbarians
Terroristic Hyperrealism
Three - We Are Everywhere
Just Give, Baby
Virtual Raider Nation
Every Track I Sizzle
Raider Empire
Four - Training Camp
Five - What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Six - Crying Won’t Help
I’m in a Strange, Strange Land
Seven - At Ricky’s
Eight - Working-Class Heroes
Haven in a Heartless World
Oaktown Devils
Nine - Raiders Rage
Panthers and Pirates
The Autumn Wind
Ten - Monday Night Lights
No Other Life Seems Real
Father of the Nation
Eleven - Real Women Wear Black
Twelve - Los Malosos
The Raider Bandit and Other Sad and Sordid Tales
The Dumbest Team in America
Nevermore
Thirteen - Just Lose, Baby
Brawling Alone
The Decline and Fall of Raider Nation?
Afterword
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
To Walt
and
In Memory of
James Albert Miller
and
Hunter S. Thompson
R.I.P.
Voodoo Man
Preface
Paradise Lost
If you have ever had to read Paradise Lost in school and found Satan to be a far more compelling character than God or Adam, you may be a Raiders fan. Sure, you knew that you were supposed to be rooting for the good guys, but they were boring. The teacher may have explained that Milton was on Team Heaven, trying to justify the ways of God to man, but Satan had a certain flair. When he said, “The mind is its own place” and “can make a Heaven of Hell, and a Hell of Heaven,” you nodded along. After the archfiend asserted that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” you applauded his sneering eloquence. Here was a rebel outcast you could identify with. It was clear that you had an affinity for the dark side, and just what it takes to cheer for the team that everyone loves to hate.1
Imagine Al Davis and his Silver and Black legions as Satan and company recently cast out of Football Heaven after a brutal Super Bowl humiliation, devastating back-to-back 4–12 and 5–11 seasons, and two years of ugly, unsatisfying courtroom antics. “Thunderstruck and astonished,” the Dark Prince rises to rally Raider Nation. “All is not lost,” he begins, “the unconquerable will and study of revenge [along with] immortal hate” will give us “courage never to submit or yield: And what is not to be overcome? That glory never shall his wrath or might extort from me.” Absolutely: We were robbed! Our rightful spot in the sun was taken from us and we’re going to get it back through open war or covert guile! Fire the coach, slap the franchise player tag on Woodson, cut loose half the defense, pick up rebel castoffs Warren Sapp, Kerry Collins, and Randy Moss. Draft Gallery with the second pick. Get a dominant running back. Just win, baby! Don’t rebuild, return to glory! That’s the spirit!2
And all of Al’s army remembers the lost paradise, the golden era of the team’s first stay in Oakland and the early days in Los Angeles, when the legendary rebels of old led the team to the best winning percentage in professional football. Raider Nation’s retro jerseys recall Lamonica, Stabler, Plunkett, Van Eeghen, Branch, Otto, Biletnikoff, Blanda, Atkinson, Hayes, Tatum, Hubbard, Casper, Upshaw, Shell, Matuszak, Hendricks, Alzado, Allen, Long, and a host of other warriors of yore. Raiders fans chant the mantras, “Just Win, Baby,” “Commitment to Excellence,” and “Pride and Poise.” The sounds of “The Autumn Wind Is a Raider” can be heard in the background. Raider Nation nurses the memories of three Super Bowl victories and curses a litany of epic bad calls. Despite the fact that the .780 winning percentage of the first decade of glory has sunk to below .500 over the last ten years, they all know that the Silver and Black will be back. Being cast down into the Black Hole of the worst back-to-back seasons in forty-two years is only a sign that their time is just around the corner. The air is thick with nostalgia and bitterness. Sweet revenge is on their minds. Raider Nation helped build Football Heaven and knows that someday they’ll rule the place again.
If you know that the good guys aren’t so good, you’re a Raiders fan. If you know you’ve been jacked and are waiting for revenge, you’re a Raiders fan. If you know your boss isn’t any better than you are, you’re a Raiders fan. If you flip off the guy who cuts you off on the freeway, you’re a Raiders fan. If you root for your adversary to lose so you don’t have to watch him celebrate, you’re a Raiders fan. If you watch gangster films and root for the mob, you’re a Raiders fan. If you hate piety, you’re a Raiders fan. If you think Al is a player and he still amuses you, you’re a Raiders fan.
We also like to imagine Al Davis as Al Swearengen, the venal, cunning, greedy, and skillfully brutal casino and brothel owner in the Social Darwinist HBO/TV western Deadwood. At first glance, he appears to be the most evil man in town, a man who’d sell his mother to make a buck (which he would), but as we learn more about the warts on the allegedly “high class” businessmen in town, Al’s honest approach starts to look better in comparison to their hypocritical facades of respectability. In a town where everybody is a “cocksucker” on the make, it’s the people with pretenses who are the most reprehensible. If Frederick Jackson Turner was right that the frontier was the proving ground that defined the American character, then Deadwood is a tough little allegory of community totally defined by market values. It’s the war of all against all. The same could be said of the NFL, or corporate America as a whole. Hence, the joke isn’t on the Raiders fans who root for the charming rogue, but on all the other people who think that their team is cleaner or that any of the corporations they entrust to entertain, employ, sustain, and protect them operates by some nicer set of rules. Like the stranger in Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” who comes to town and waltzes into the church to tell the good people that their prayers for “victory” over their enemies are really curses, we are here to tell you, dear reader, that Raider Nation is America. That said, everyone in town thought that the stranger was a lunatic.
Enter the Barbarians
The barbarians were at the gates. “What if You Threw a Party and Raider Nation Came?” a worried San Diego Union-Tribune front-page headline once asked. The answer, it appeared, was fear and loathing. Days before the Oakland Raiders even won the playoff to come to Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego, the host city was already in panic mode with reminiscences of past atrocities. The Raider Nation: they brawl, bite the ears off innocent residents, stab local fans, and then proudly display video footage of the carnage on fan websites. Downtown businesses were desperately consulting security firms, and well-heeled residents were rethinking whether or not they wanted to bilk Raiders fans out of thousands of dollars for the privilege of staying in their swank bay-view condos. Waiters were dreading the influx of rude cheapskates and belching ruffians. Only the local bail bonds man, “King” Stahlman, was happy, brimming with anticipation that his profits would soar into the stratosphere with mass arrests.3
The Oakland Tribune paid back in kind with the headline, “San Diego Full of Raider Haters.” It mocked the suntanned dilettantes to the south by observing of the Gaslamp Quarter that the “formerly rough, newly gentrified neighborhood” was “allergic to riff-raff.
” As another paper noted, the Super Bowl had “become a cruel nightmare for most residents in San Diego.” “There is a general feeling that they are coming to destroy our town,” said one San Diego businessman, pondering whether he should “duct tape his windows.” “Their fans aren’t our type of clientele,” noted one snotty La Jolla restaurateur, “We want Miami or New York: rich people with lots of money.” Raiders supporters had celebrated the AFC Championship by rioting and running amok in Oakland and now, yuppie San Diegans imagined, America’s most hated fans were licking their chops at the prospects of pillaging an enemy citadel.4
The feared image of Raider Nation is part fact and part fiction. More than any other fandom in American professional sports, Raiders aficionados’ devotion goes beyond sports. Like British soccer hooligans, it’s in the blood. In a city that had 113 murders in 2002 along with a massive budget deficit and a troubled school system, the Raiders represent a chimera of hope and pride. As homeless Oakland resident Ben Ducksworth put it while collecting empty beer cans on East 12th Street, “The Raiders lift us all up. . . . I may be homeless and broke but I’m a winner. That’s because my blood runs silver and black.” The same holds true for “The Violator,” the heavily costumed Raider NFL Hall of Fame fan, who despite being an unemployed construction worker from Los Angeles, still managed to make five games in 2002 and was personally flown up to the Championship by Raiders owner Al Davis. (There is little Al can do for the infamous “Raider Bandit,” who, during the team’s L.A. years, robbed a series of banks to pay for his football experience, only to be stymied when his TV privileges were cut off behind bars.)5
Raider Nation also includes the cops and firefighters who gather for Bloody Marys at the Fat Lady in downtown Oakland before games, the Brawley policeman who heads the Imperial Valley fan club, and a regular contingent of L.A. gangbangers who make their way up to see games. The 66th Mob and the 66th Avenue Black Hole includes SUV-driving families who show up as early as three days before games to party on city streets just outside the stadium in anticipation of their game day tailgates. There they are joined by college professors, union longshoremen, peace activists with a secret vice, bikers in face paint, Baptist ministers, blue-collar pirates in full dress, and one-time wannabes. “It’s an experience,” observed CBS director Larry Cavolina after driving through a Raider tailgate traffic jam for an hour and a half, “It’s like Woodstock.”6
Cavolina’s comparison is not far off base, since both Woodstock Nation and Raider Nation are imagined communities, which, in their own ways, paradoxically express the dominant values of the culture along with a utopian reaction against them. The semi-weekly masquerade in the Black Hole, the rowdiest, most notorious seating section of Silver and Black fandom and elsewhere throughout Network Associates Oakland Coliseum, is a display of intensely competitive tribalism accompanied by an equally deep longing for community. To outsiders, Raider Nation embodies the evil, animalistic “monster” that threatens much of middle-class America’s heavily racist and classist imaginary. The multiracial, largely blue-collar Raiders fan-base is the “bad part of town” gathered en masse to menace fans accustomed to watered-down, Disneyfied corporate sports experiences.
That Raider Nation is a partial source of identity for two of the West Coast’s most blighted communities, Oakland’s flatlands and Southeast Los Angeles, only puts fuel on the fire. A gritty alternative to California’s sunshine-and-granola image, Raider Nation has become a one-size-fits-all repository of rebellion for a far-flung national, indeed global, diaspora of fans smitten with their outlaw mystique. Real or imagined, the Raider Nation is an affirmation of blue-collar toughness, rebellion, and solidarity during a time that valorizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In an era that craves order and safety, Raider Nation offers chaos and fun. In the face of the new Puritanism, “Just say no” and “Watch what you say,” the Raider Nation says, “Fuck you.”
This is not a book about football, but a book about a fan culture that is unique in American society. We spent the abysmal 2003 season attending Raiders games in Oakland’s “Black Hole,” going to Ricky’s sports bar in San Leandro and the Fat Lady in Oakland, corresponding with legions of rabid fans nationwide via mail and e-mail, and talking with them over the phone. We visited Raiders fans in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas, watching road games in living rooms, sports bars, and San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, site of the Raiders unofficial ninth home game. As a result, this book gives the reader an inside-out look into the dreaded self-described Raider Nation. Our larger focus is on the various identities present in Raiders fandom: West Coast rust belt, Southeast L.A. gangsters, tough “Real Women” in black, virtual members of the Black Hole who form a global diaspora of TV watchers and website participants, obsessive tailgaters, “professional” fans, and various subgroups and hangers-on. Our role as participant-observers helped us delve into the interesting intersections of class, race, gender, region, and imagination that is Raider Nation.
While we suggest a number of theoretical and/or political ways to interpret Raider Nation, we allow contradictory readings to emerge through the voices of the various fans and observers we interviewed. Thus, the messy, amorphous nature of this imagined community is ultimately left unresolved. The fan interviews that comprise this book have been edited for brevity and readability and arranged in order to maintain the chronological and thematic coherence of the text, but not at the expense of the integrity of the individual voices of the fans. Better to Reign in Hell is a hybrid text, mixing together cultural studies, sports writing, sociology, historical analysis, political commentary, first-person reportage, and interviews in an effort to parse out the various meanings of Raiders fan culture. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent—and not so innocent. The introduction gives a conceptual map of Raider Nation, chapters 1 through 3 take the reader on a first-person tour of the Raiders’ Super Bowl nightmare in San Diego, give a history of the postevent riot in Oakland, and explore the virtual and global reaches of the Raider Empire. Our 2003 journey begins in chapter 4 in training camp and continues through the rest of the book until the bitter end takes us full circle back to San Diego. Most of the writing is done from Jim’s perspective with Kelly intervening in the latter part of chapter 7 on Ricky’s sports bar and for the entirety of chapter 11 about real women who wear black.
This project should be compelling and informative for fan and nonfan alike, providing a window into the real story behind the media hype. As the riots following the Raiders’ Super Bowl loss, the consistent brawling at the Raiders–Chargers games, and the die-hard loyalty and community of true Raiders fans show, this phenomenon demonstrates how sports fandom in its extreme form has become a site in which to express both the longing to be part of something larger, and the anger, frustration, and brutality that is the underside of American life for millions of people. While we will not shy away from the darker aspects of Raider Nation’s story, this book is also a celebratory tale written by longtime Raiders fans who believe that, warts and all, “the living crowd” at Raiders games is one of the last surviving examples of Walt Whitman’s rough, generous, egalitarian America:Of every hue and cast am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentlemen, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest,
I resist anything better than my own diversity.”7
The Oakland Lady
Introduction
Raider Nation as an Imagined Community
I root for the Oakland Raiders because they hire castoffs, outlaws, malcontents, and fuckups, they have lots of penalties, fights, and paybacks, and because Al Davis told the rest of the pig NFL owners to go get fucked. Also they don’t have a lot of Christians kneeling down to pray after touchdowns. Christians are ruining sports. Someday the Raiders will be strong again, and they will dip the ball in shit and shove it down the throats of the wholesome, white, heartland teams that pray together and don’t deliver
late hits.
George Carlin, Braindroppings
Reading Football and Its Fans
How, an unschooled observer might ask, did American culture get to the point where famous comedians and columnists along with ordinary fans associate their loyalty to a football team so closely with prominent aspects of individual and group identity? How did a professional football club come to represent the qualities of the antihero or, more incredibly, come to magically bestow upon their followers a countercultural credibility and/or a gangster’s swagger? How did the act of collectively consuming the commercial product that is a slickly packaged and sophisticatedly marketed professional football game come to bring people together as “blood brothers” (or sisters, for that matter)? What in the world does any of this have to do with football?
Michael Oriard, ex–Kansas City Chief and trail-blazing scholar of the gridiron, notes that football had “become a social event as well as an athletic contest” by the 1890s. After more than a century of changes, the social event that is football has evolved into a multibillion-dollar spectacle that is far more important economically than the athletic contest itself. With an $18 billion television contract, the National Football League draws larger TV audiences, attracts more million-dollar advertising deals, sells more merchandise, and has a larger influence on the culture than any other American sport. It even has its own round-the-clock channel, the NFL Network. Why all the attention? For Oriard, it is “beauty and chaos” that compels the fans to watch the game. More specifically, “It is not simply the violence that spectators . . . celebrate in football, but the human capacity to withstand violence and create something beautiful despite it, or even from it.”1